13 Bullets

Part V - Malvern

Chapter 54

There's a stake in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you.

-Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"

"Five," Arkeley moaned.

She shoved the handgun into the empty holster at her belt. It almost fit. With the step-ladder and with hands that shook badly she managed to lower Arkeley onto the floor. She found rolls of gauze and surgical tape in a rolling cart.

"Five," he said again, as if he'd just remembered something.

His injuries were terrible. The half-deads had really worked him over-his skin was a maze of cuts, most of them inflamed, and the skin that wasn't sliced or torn was bruised and even chewed in places. His eyes were swollen shut and his mouth was black and swollen with bruising. Then of course there were the fingers that Scapegrace had torn off. Caxton wrapped his left hand in gauze that instantly turned red with bright arterial blood. She wound more and more bandaging around the wound, tight but not too tight. At least it was his left hand. He would still have the use of his right hand. He could still shoot.

Except-he wasn't doing any shooting anymore. Not that night, probably not for months. He couldn't even sit up.

A cold flash went through her when she realized she had been expecting him to get up this whole time and reclaim his gun. She had really thought that her part was done and she could let him mop up.

"Five," he mumbled.

"Shh," she said.

It wasn't going to happen. He wasn't going to fight the half-deads. He wasn't going to walk out of Arabella Furnace. It was up to her to get out, to run and get help. Maybe-maybe-she could save his life but it was all up to her.

"Five."

"Okay already," she said. "Five what? Five half-deads? I think there were more than that when I came in. If you tell me there are five active vampires here I'm going to soil my uniform." She smiled and patted his good hand.

He sucked in a painful breath and then spoke all in a rush. "There's only one more active vampire," he said. He waited a moment, then finished. "There are five bullets remaining in your clip."

Slowly she removed the Glock from her belt. She ejected the clip and counted the remaining rounds. There were only five left, just as he had said. That was impossible-she couldn't possibly have already fired eight bullets, could she? She went over the recent combat in her head and realized she had.

She slipped the clip back into the handgun and holstered it again.

"Be more careful," he said, his head rolling back and forth. "From now on."

She nodded in agreement. He probably didn't see it, though, because just then the lights went out.

It happened so quickly Caxton thought it had to be in her head. She blinked her eyes but the blue light didn't come back. Featureless darkness filled all the available space around her, so thick she felt as if it were rubbing on her dry eyeballs.

"Oh God," she said. "They know. They know something's up-what do we do now?"

Arkeley didn't answer. She reached over and grabbed his bloody wrist. He had a pulse, still, but he must have fallen unconscious.

Caxton searched her pockets, hoping she had some kind of light source on her. Something-anything. Scapegrace had taken most of her gadgets away from her, cellphone, PDA, handcuffs. "Oh, thank you," Caxton whispered, not knowing who she was talking to. The vampire had ignored her mini-Maglite. He'd probably figured she couldn't hurt anyone with it. She took it out and pointed it at Arkeley. The miniature flashlight spat out a foggy cone of pale blue illumination that dazzled her eyes for a second. It gave off just enough light for her to see that he was still breathing.

There was a telephone mounted on one wall. She grabbed the handset and pressed it to her ear. No dial tone rewarded her. She flicked the hook a couple of dozen times, trying to make it work, but no dice. Whoever cut the power must have cut the sanatorium's phone lines, too.

Which meant they had to know everything. They knew where she was and what her first move would be.

If the half-deads-and the remaining vampire-knew she was in Malvern's ward then her first goal had to be to get away. She couldn't move Arkeley-he outweighed her considerably and she couldn't drag him-so she decided she would have to leave him there on the floor. If the bad guys killed him out of spite she would hate herself forever but she imagined they would be too preoccupied trying to kill her.

Waving her light around she found the exit from the ward and slipped along the wall of the corridor beyond. The Glock stayed in her holster so she wouldn't waste a bullet if she jumped at the first sight of her own shadow. That was an Arkeley kind of thing to do and she was proud of thinking of it. Of course, Arkelely would already have a plan by this point. He would already be putting it into effect.

"Think," she said, trying to break the layer of fear that covered her brain like frost. "Think." What could she hope to realistically achieve? She didn't consider herself tough enough to take on another vampire and an unknown number of half-deads on her own. She'd only beaten Reyes because of Vesta Polder's amulet, and Scapegrace had died of surprise, not any special quality she possessed. So if she couldn't fight, what could she do?

She could run. She could get out of the hospital, get to some place where she could call for backup. It was the only realistic plan. The half-deads would try to stop her, she knew. She tried to think like a faceless freak. They hadn't attacked her directly yet-no, they wouldn't. They were cowards. Arkeley had told her as much. They would fall back, take away her ability to see and her ability to communicate. They would try to flush her out, to make her walk right into their traps. The half-deads would have secured the main entrance. Going out the way she came in would be suicide. She ducked down the first side corridor she saw. She remembered her first visit to the sanatorium. She'd thought it was a big spooky maze then. With the lights out it was a lot more unnerving and a whole lot harder to find her way around. She knew generally what direction she was headed: southeast, toward the greenhouse wing. Yes, that would be good. If she could just get outside she would feel much safer. The moonlight might actually let her see something useful.

Her flashlight speared out before, illuminating a lot less than she would have liked. The corridor it lit up was a gallery of dim reflections and long shadows. Anything could be ahead of her, waiting for her. Anything at all. She kept her back to the wall and edged forward, a step at a time. There was nothing else for it. She was halfway down the corridor, her eyes watching every doorway, when she began to hear a noise like something moving around inside the wall at her back. She shied away from it and heard it dash away from her, as if they'd scared each other off. It was a rhythmic skittering sound, or rather a whole group of sounds, the patter of tiny claws on wood, the thumping of a soft body dragging across broken plaster. Ahead of her, down the hallway, something oozed out of the wall and dropped to the floor.

She swung her light around and speared a rat with her flashlight beam. Its tiny eyes blazed as it looked back at her. Its nose twitched and then it bolted away.

"Nothing," she said, trying to reassure herself. It came out a little louder than she'd meant it to.

Ahead of her, at the end of the corridor, a half-dead hissed, "What was that?"

She stopped in her tracks. She stopped breathing. She switched off her flashlight. There was a tiny bit of light coming in through square inset windows in the double doors at the end of the hallway. A shadow moved across that light, a shadow like a human head.

"Did you see that?" someone else asked, with the same kind of squeaky, rat-like voice. Another half-dead. "Somebody had a light on and they switched it off."

"Get the others," the first voice said.

The double doors slammed open then and what looked like a never-ending stream of human silhouettes flooded into the hall.